From owner-freebsd-questions Tue May 2 7:11:42 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from elcb.co.za (ns1.elcb.co.za [196.26.96.130]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id BD79E37B982 for ; Tue, 2 May 2000 07:11:10 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mvincent@elcb.co.za) Received: from marius.elcb.co.za ([196.11.122.217] helo=MVincent) by elcb.co.za with smtp (Exim 3.12 #1) id 12mdNY-0002nn-00; Tue, 02 May 2000 16:10:24 +0200 From: "Marius Vincent" To: Cc: "freeBSD-Questions" Subject: RE: vinum Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 16:08:31 +0200 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 In-Reply-To: <390EDC99.A77180C7@wmptl.com> Importance: Normal Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi Well actually you can software mirror a complete phisical disk, INCLUDING "/". The mirroring sofware writes in raw format.It reproduces block for block on drives. ONLY RAID5 and so on cannot be software mirrored,because you have to bring up your operating software first and then bringup your software raid package.This will in turn activate the raid devices.If you run hardware raid like Clarion. The operating system thinks you only have 1 phisical disk and has absolutely nothing to do with raid at all. The point being that you can indeed sofware raid a complete phisical disk.(Even microcrap can do this with standard NT4.0). Thanx for the help.I must not f*ck around on my mailbox with this. Tell me how safe is this program to use if you have no idea what you are doing? Marius Vincent ELCB Info Services >I'm trying to do much the same as you are. We're attempting to setup FreeBSD boxes with mirrored drives for speed/redundancy, yet we do not want to pay for a hardware raid. Vinum/CCD is what you're looking for, try a 'man ccd', and a 'man ccdconfig' they'll tell you how to accomplish the task. Please note though, that you cannot mirror / (the root), nor can you mirror a partition that you would boot from. I reccomend getting a smaller (500megs or so) hardisk and putting the identical drives to be mirrored into primary/slave, and secondary/master. My configurations is as follows: AMD K62-500mhz, 256megs Ram (just if you're curious), Quantum Fireball 365meg Ide as primary master, Maxtor 7200RPM 15Gig ata33 as primary slave, (mirrored to first Maxtor HD) - Maxtor 7200RPM 15Gig ata33 as secondary Master, 50X Acer eide cdrom as secondary/slave, I have the 365meg HD mounted as /, and the two 15gig drives are seperated into 800Meg swap and /server (same partition table accross both drives), using ccd to mirror the partitions. Hope this will help you out a little, Nathan Vidican webmaster@wmptl.com Windsor Match Plate & Tool Ltd. http://www.wmptl.com/ > Marius Vincent wrote: > > Hi > > Has anyone used vinum before?? > Please let me know where I can find more help about starting off with > vinum. > I want to purchase an identical IDE secondary drive to my primary > sothat I can mirror the two of them. > Any way I must startoff with vinum?? > > Thanx > > Marius Vincent > Technical > ELCB Information Services > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message